The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath Reslept Read online



  The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath Reslept

  by Holly Philippa Lovecraft

  Copyright 2010 Holly Philippa Lovecraft

  A Randy Carter story

  A Gender Switch Adventure

  Three times Randy Carter dreamed of the marvelous city, and three times was she snatched away while still she paused on the high terrace above it. All golden and lovely it blazed in the sunset, with walls, temples, colonnades and arched bridges of veined marble, silver-basined fountains of prismatic spray in broad squares and perfumed gardens, and wide streets marching between delicate trees and blossom-laden urns and ivory statues in gleaming rows; while on steep northward slopes climbed tiers of red roofs and old peaked gables harbouring little lanes of grassy cobbles. It was a fever of the gods, a fanfare of supernal trumpets and a clash of immortal cymbals. Mystery hung about it as clouds about a fabulous unvisited mountain; and as Carter stood breathless and expectant on that balustraded parapet there swept up to her the poignancy and suspense of almost-vanished memory, the pain of lost things and the maddening need to place again what once had been an awesome and momentous place.

  She knew that for her its meaning must once have been supreme; though in what cycle or incarnation she had known it, or whether in dream or in waking, she could not tell. Vaguely it called up glimpses of a far forgotten first youth, when wonder and pleasure lay in all the mystery of days, and dawn and dusk alike strode forth prophetic to the eager sound of lutes and song, unclosing fiery gates toward further and surprising marvels. But each night as she stood on that high marble terrace with the curious urns and carven rail and looked off over that hushed sunset city of beauty and unearthly immanence she felt the bondage of dream's tyrannous gods; for in no wise could she leave that lofty spot, or descend the wide marmoreal fights flung endlessly down to where those streets of elder witchery lay outspread and beckoning.

  When for the third time she awakened with those flights still undescended and those hushed sunset streets still untraversed, she prayed long and earnestly to the hidden gods of dream that brood capricious above the clouds on unknown Kadath, in the cold waste where no woman treads. But the gods made no answer and shewed no relenting, nor did they give any favouring sign when she prayed to them in dream, and invoked them sacrificially through the smooth priests of Nasht and Kaman-Thah, whose cavern-temple with its pillar of flame lies not far from the gates of the waking world. It seemed, however, that her prayers must have been adversely heard, for after even the first of them she ceased wholly to behold the marvellous city; as if her three glimpses from afar had been mere accidents or oversights, and against some hidden plan or wish of the gods.

  At length, sick with longing for those glittering sunset streets and cryptical hill lanes among ancient tiled roofs, nor able sleeping or waking to drive them from her mind, Carter resolved to go with bold entreaty whither no woman had gone before, and dare the icy deserts through the dark to where unknown Kadath, veiled in cloud and crowned with unimagined stars, holds secret and nocturnal the onyx castle of the Great Ones.

  In light slumber she descended the seventy steps to the cavern of flame and talked of this design to the smooth priests Nasht and Kaman-Thah. And the priests shook their pshent-bearing heads and vowed it would be the death of her soul. They pointed out that the Great Ones had shown already their wish, and that it is not agreeable to them to be harassed by insistent pleas. They reminded her, too, that not only had no woman ever been to Kadath, but no woman had ever suspected in what part of space it may lie; whether it be in the dreamlands around our own world, or in those surrounding some unguessed companion of Fomalhaut or Aldebaran. If in our dreamland, it might conceivably be reached, but only three human souls since time began had ever crossed and recrossed the black impious gulfs to other dreamlands, and of that three, two had come back quite mad. There were, in such voyages, incalculable local dangers; as well as that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe, where no dreams reach; that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity - the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of accursed flutes; to which detestable pounding and piping dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic Ultimate gods, the blind, voiceless, tenebrous, mindless Other gods whose soul and messenger is the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep.

  Of these things was Carter warned by the priests Nasht and Kaman-Thah in the cavern of flame, but still she resolved to find the gods on unknown Kadath in the cold waste, wherever that might be, and to win from them the sight and remembrance and shelter of the marvellous sunset city. She knew that her journey would be strange and long, and that the Great Ones would be against it; but being old in the land of dream she counted on many useful memories and devices to aid her. So asking a formal blessing of the priests and thinking shrewdly on her course, she boldly descended the seven hundred steps to the Gate of Deeper Slumber and set out through the Enchanted Wood.

  In the tunnels of that twisted wood, whose low prodigious oaks twine groping boughs and shine dim with the phosphorescence of strange fungi, dwell the furtive and secretive Zoogs; who know many obscure secrets of the dream world and a few of the waking world, since the wood at two places touches the lands of women, though it would be disastrous to say where. Certain unexplained rumours, events, and vanishments occur among women where the Zoogs have access, and it is well that they cannot travel far outside the world of dreams. But over the nearer parts of the dream world they pass freely, flitting small and brown and unseen and bearing back piquant tales to beguile the hours around their hearths in the forest they love. Most of them live in burrows, but some inhabit the trunks of the great trees; and although they live mostly on fungi it is muttered that they have also a slight taste for meat, either physical or spiritual, for certainly many dreamers have entered that wood who have not come out. Carter, however, had no fear; for she was an old dreamer and had learnt their fluttering language and made many a treaty with them; having found through their help the splendid city of Celephais in Ooth-Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills, where reigns half the year the great Queen Kuranes, a woman she had known by another name in life. Kuranes was the one soul who had been to the star-gulls and returned free from madness.

  Threading now the low phosphorescent aisles between those gigantic trunks, Carter made fluttering sounds in the manner of the Zoogs, and listened now and then for responses. She remembered one particular village of the creatures was in the centre of the wood, where a circle of great mossy stones in what was once a cleaning tells of older and more terrible dwellers long forgotten, and toward this spot she hastened. She traced her way by the grotesque fungi, which always seem better nourished as one approaches the dread circle where elder beings danced and sacrificed. Finally the great light of those thicker fungi revealed a sinister green and grey vastness pushing up through the roof of the forest and out of sight. This was the nearest of the great ring of stones, and Carter knew she was close to the Zoog village. Renewing her fluttering sound, she waited patiently; and was at last rewarded by an impression of many eyes watching her. It was the Zoogs, for one sees their weird eyes long before one can discern their small, slippery brown outlines.

  Out they swarmed, from hidden burrow and honeycombed tree, till the whole dim-litten region was alive with them. Some of the wilder ones brushed Carter unpleasantly, and one even nipped loathsomely at her ear; but these lawless spirits were soon restrained by their elders. The Council of Sages, reco
gnizing the visitor, offered a gourd of fermented sap from a haunted tree unlike the others, which had grown from a seed dropt down by someone on the moon; and as Carter drank it ceremoniously a very strange colloquy began. The Zoogs did not, unfortunately, know where the peak of Kadath lies, nor could they even say whether the cold waste is in our dream world or in another. Rumours of the Great Ones came equally from all points; and one might only say that they were likelier to be seen on high mountain peaks than in valleys, since on such peaks they dance reminiscently when the moon is above and the clouds beneath.

  Then one very ancient Zoog recalled a thing unheard-of by the others; and said that in Ulthar, beyond the River Skai, there still lingered the last copy of those inconceivably old Pnakotic Manuscripts made by waking women in forgotten boreal kingdoms and borne into the land of dreams when the hairy cannibal Gnophkehs overcame many-templed Olathoe and slew all the heroes of the land of Lomar. Those manuscripts she said, told much of the gods, and besides, in Ulthar there were women who had seen the signs of the